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eGroupware + SE PC Suite

nospam@example.com (Rodger Donaldson) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:43:00 +1300

Pleasantly surprised to note that the Sony-Ericsson PC suite will out-of-the-box sync with any SyncML capable host—Funambol or eGroupware—thereby syncing your phone to the rest of your world. While I’ve got a (tiny) data plan and I’m generally happy to OTA sync, New Zealand belongs to that sub-Third World chunk of the mobile data universe where data is excruciatingly expensive and syncing by cable can be an attractive option.

Anyway, if this is relevant to your interests, it’s pretty straightforward:

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eGroupware + Debian + c903

nospam@example.com (Rodger Donaldson) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:59:00 +1300

Having had a good time getting Funambol working for OTA syncing is great, but it’s one part of a solution; it’s great for backup and multi-device information sharing, but it doesn’t give much in the way of, say, cross-user calender sharing.

Enter groupware solutions. (Look ma, I’m talking like an architect!)

Having poke about a bit, I’m trying eGroupware. It’s an free solution (albeit with a more featureful commercial variant); it supports PostgreSQL (a must-have for me), and it doesn’t require any kind of full stack replacement (other suites of this sort, as I have lamented in the past seem to require you replace your existing mail server, web server, and random other components). This all looks reasonably positive, as does the fact that it’s regularly producing releases and appears to be taking patches from an active community.

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It's Mac vs PC All Over Again (I Hope)

nospam@example.com (Rodger Donaldson) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:07:06 +1300

I’ve been thinking that iPhone vs Andoid has more than a whiff of Mac vs PC all over again about it, and Apple going after HTC as a proxy for Google just bakes that impression in; I’m not the only one who remembers as far back as Apple’s look and feel lawsuits, although that seems to be rather undercommented upon these days, as is Steve Jobs’ apparent long-forgotten view that people making expansion cards for the old pre-Mac Apple platforms were stealing money that belonged to Apple (which was, presumably, part of the reason why the original Mac was a sealed box).

Apple’s hostility to openness is one of those odd features of the modern computing landscape; they are, to the best of my knowledge, the only company the FSF refused to have software ported to (because of the look-and-feel suit), and their modern-day developer agreements for their sealed platforms are fabulously Draconian. It was one of the weirder aspects of LCA2010 to hear people booing DRM, software patents, overzealous IP law, and Microsoft, while watching them poke at their iPhones and Macbooks. Disconnect much?

There is one thing I must disagree mightily with Harry McCracken on:

So here’s the grim and dystopian scenario, and it’s grim and dystopian for Apple, not for HTC or Google: A few years from now, maybe this new case will end up looking as ill-advised as the 1988 one.[...]Maybe people will see the iPhone as a breakthrough that lost ground to a less inventive but more pervasive competitor. I hope not.

I hope so. I mean, my preference would be for Maemo-MeeGo-whatever the fuck it’s called this week to win out, but I think Nokia’s recent record of shooting its toes off will probably carry over to what is, the bleatings of Google fanboys notwithstanding, the most open phone platform on the market. But as a realist, I’d settle for seeing Android crush the iPhone, if only as a consumer. Consider the iPhone: a sealed unit, no expansion, no replacability, what Apple think I need. It’s Apple 1984 all over again. Andriod, on the other hand—you want an expandable phone? Get an HTC Legend where you have SD card support, rather than paying Apple an extortionate sum for the igger phone option. And a battery you can change. You want to live in the future? How about lobbying Samsung to release their Beam as a product, rather than waiting for Steve Jobs to decide whether you deserve a projecter. That’s the nice thing about the ‘droid; like the PC universe created by the ubiquity of DOS and then Windows, you have multiple manufacturers vying to lure you to their product, and responsive to your niche. You want a better-than-shitty-2 MP camera? There’s a droid manufacturer who’s releasing those. You want a bigger screen? More storage? Longer battery life? Go nuts.

The Android ecosystem is far from perfect; Google are certainly nowhere near as open a company, or as good at playing with the open-source projects they crib from, as their more enthusiastic fans would have you believe. But they are a hell of a lot better than the sealed-hood world Apple would like you to live in. If Apple’s decision to wage patent war against Android backfires and consigned them to the (ultimate) irrelevance of their decisions to prefer litigation and owning a high-priced vertically integrated stack did in the late 80s and 90s, I, for one, will be delighted.

Funambol + C903

nospam@example.com (Rodger Donaldson) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:39:00 +1300

Funambol, formerly Sync4J, is a number of things, but the bit I care about is that it’s a FOSS SyncML server you can download, run on your own server, and appears to be widely supported by all sorts of other FOSS tools (groupware, PIM software, and so on), and offer support for a huge variety of free and non-free SyncML clients. Since I can has data plan the idea of over-the-air syncing to a SyncML host has gained greater appeal, on top of the pre-existing appeal of making it easier to share calendars and the like with Maire.

The out-of-the-box delivery for Funambol is a binary Linux package that contains a JDK, Tomcat6, an RDBMs, and Funambol itself. On the one hand, this makes getting it up and running in a one-clickish fashion kind of easy. On the other hand, if you already have a database server and app server configured (for example) this is a bit of a wasteful duplication of resources; Funambol will let you work with (some) alternatives.

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In Which I Raise a Ruthless Realist

nospam@example.com (Rodger Donaldson) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:26:30 +1300

Ada: “I am going to make this a chicken sandwich. Chicken is going in the sandwich. He is in my big car.”

Rodger: “Does chicken want to be eaten?”

Ada: “Nooooo.”

Rodger: “Then perhaps chicken shouldn’t go in the sandwich.”

Ada: “Chicken has to go in the sandwich, because it’s a chicken sandwich.”

Ada then stuffs the toy chicken—the same toy chicken, I note that went to hospital with her when she was seriously ill at 7 months—into the cushions making up the sandwich, ordering him to “push your head in!”, throws a towel over it so the sandwich will cook, and then announces:

“Chicken is making a terrible fuss!”

Rodger: “Is that because chicken doesn’t want to be eaten?”

Ada: “Yes. Now you must eat the chicken sandwich.”

Fortunately I had already been designated a triceratops, so no chicken for me.

I’m far too sentimental to have given her any of this cooking and eating my toys. I blame her mother.

Barbie Girl in a CS World

nospam@example.com (Rodger Donaldson) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:21:30 +1300

See this? Different (and longer) perspective on what I was getting at here.

The Arthur Trilogy

nospam@example.com (Rodger Donaldson) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +1300

Historical romances are an area that tend to be considered under the general rubric of writing for women, not least because of the association with bodice rippers; it’s an association that does the genre no favours, since it becomes synonymous with “crap”.

It’s a rather unfair reputation on two fronts; any genre will be rich in rivers of crap, and it seems a little unfair for fans of one genre to look down their noses at fans of other genres based on the lower echelons of the works in said genre. Moreover, there are no shortage of men who worked in it, including Arthur Conan Doyle (whose White Company and short stories set in post-Roman Britain dovetail neatly with chunks of Cornwall’s work).

Anyway, I’ve had bits of Cornwall’s Arthur series lying around the house since, well, since I got the second on in the series from a reviewer who was clearing out the newspaper’s unwanted review copies in, oh, 1999. So I guess it was time to get around to reading them.

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Propelling Us to Third World Status

nospam@example.com (Rodger Donaldson) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 22:07:00 +1300

I’m going to miss the magic cloud of Internet that follows me around. (at least, without it costing me per kilobyte..)
_hristine

One of the little perks of my work is getting a better (read: cheaper and more capable) cellphone plan that I’ve had previously. That’s nice and all, and after much deliberation I slapped a small data plan on it. It still costs less than I’ve been spending on my old plan, but I have a shiny new capability.

Sort of.

Kiwis and Aussies will be unsurprised to learn that $10/mo gets me a pitiful 100MB of data; any international reader from the first world will most likely be slack-jawed with amazement. This is a charge rate comparable to Actrix’s rates for international traffic two decades ago; at that point Actrix at least had the excuse that as and that they were one of the first ISPs in the world they were running on what was, at the time, horrifically expensive proprietary Unix hardware and, perhaps more importantly, New Zealand’s international Internet pipe was less than a half megabit for the whole country.

But still. Two decades.

Two things rammed it home for me: LCA2010 where I got to work with a warm, comfortable, CBD-encompassing cloud of 802.11 goodness courtesy of CityLink’s event sponsorship for a week, and Christine’s comment above. In Canada, whose inhabitants consider themselves horribly mobile Internet deprived, she enjoys a 6GB/mo plan. That would cost me $600 per month at the rates I’ve got.

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Elizabeth's in trouble now!

nospam@example.com (Rodger Donaldson) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:03:07 +1300

Putting the Queen on notice

I assume this is yet another set of buildings the NZTA are deliberately running down so the Wellington City council can pave over more of the central city, which annoys me, but it’s pretty funny seeing The Queen getting a rude letter about the state of her properties, nonetheless.

I had something profound to say...

nospam@example.com (Rodger Donaldson) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:33:10 +1300

...about the Wellington City Council’s efforts to “ban liquor consumption” in the city, but then I drank half a bottle of Rabbit Ranch’s Central Otago pinot noir. It was very nice indeed, but it has rather left me a little short on the word front.

There are three points that especially bug me around this, I guess:

As Wellingtonista notes, this will most likely be open to abuse via “discretion”. I disagree with their proposed vector for abuse—I think it’s more likely to be “drinking while young” rather than “drinking while brown”, but the net effect will be the same. Near-middle-aged-me and my near-middle-aged friends will be able to quaff our favourite allegedly classy booze at picnics while our kids run riot in the Botannical Gardens. Twenty year olds will be getting a move-along with the threat of a night in the cells for doing exactly the same thing. This is the sort of thing that stinks on principle, and also undermines the police themselves.
As they also note, there are ample, often very broad, easily enforcable laws about being drunk and a dickhead in a public place. Of course, they’re often ignored when it comes to socially sanctioned dickheadery (gigs, sports, etc), but it’s consistent with a trend of passing stupid, overbroad laws, usually explicitly intended to be used on “the youth” instead of enforcing existing ones.
Finally, and this is one the Wellingtonista folks don’t have a hack at, but is the one that pisses me off the most, this doesn’t restrict “drinking in public” or “drunken behaviour” in Wellington one little bit. Is Cuba Mall private? Is Courtney Place private? Nope, but the council gives boozatoriums licenses to spill their shitfaced clientele all over these public spaces. And, of course, bars are all too happy to liquor patrons up and them kick them out when they become too much of a nuisance, leaving them to harass passers-by and make work for the cops later in the evening. If the council were serious about too much booze in the central city they might be asking why I can’t walk up Cuba Mall in the morning with my daughter without having to weave through winos propped up at pubs, puffing away and abusing random passers by for their entertainment. But, of course, those establishments have funnelled cash into the right pockets, unlike the aforementioned 20-somethings, so they’re Not Part Of The Problem.

(To add to my final point: in all the time I’ve lived in Wellington, I have yet—and I know I’m tempting fate by blogging this—yet to be bothered in the central city streets by aggressive drunks in any serious way; the near-punchups I’ve had to deal with have all happened in central city bars.)